The Dreams That Dream Me

from the land of dreams in the misty island. Or, alternatively, from the flat above a shop on the Kentish Town Road, amidst the shouts of the midnight drunks and the police sirens.

Monday, April 11, 2011

The Enemy

A little brush with the most terrifying dream in the world.

I woke up in shivers, my head under the blanket -and didn't dare open my eyes or move. I knew 'it' or he, whatever it is, was in the room. I knew what was happening: about to unfold, the final encounter between me, another iteration of me who also was in the room but who I couldn't see or sense, just knew he -or me, was there, and the Enemy, so inconceivably bigger and also smaller, so difficult to imagine even, without a face although 'he' could choose to appear with any face he wanted. Perhaps a Demon, or the very master of the demons, whatever they truly were… 'demon' is only a word, has a lot of connotations of theism and religion. What I was dealing with was similar but different -if it was indeed different, as I couldn't get to know what it truly was; a being that was the sum total of terror and evil, larger and smaller than anything in the world and the world itself. In my dreams I've recurrently brushed with the story many many times. I can never remember the whole story once awake, it is a little bit as if something inside my mind was trying to protect me from remembering too much about it. I know I have, purposefully or unintendedly, challenged this being, who sometimes I battle with and defeat momentarily, sometimes at the cost of the destruction of my old house in Catia or my whole home city, but it is a temporary respite; we escape or hide but we know it is going to happen again and in the end of time we will lose. That is what I know about the story, of which I get glimpses, different iterations with different developments, each time I dream. More often we're on the run trying to escape from it, or hiding in what remains of my old house, or there is a temporary respite when I have found a way to conceal my hiding place or my presence from the Evil Being. This, alas, can be done only for a little while.

The Enemy has just half-woken me up, a brush of cold void to make me wake up in terror, just for fun perhaps or maybe with some purpose that is beyond what I can comprehend. It is not 'me', this iteration of me that he is about to fight and, given the overwhelming odds, probably defeat and destroy today. But all the same I know it is me in a deeper sense who is out there and unaware of me under the blankets not daring to open my eyes. Tension and terror rise and I finally wake up in cold sweat, my cat pounding the mattress next to my face and making little noises indicating she's completely spooked. I daren't open my eyes: I know I'm still dreaming and there may be many more layers of dream to get through before I truly wake up -my poor little kitty has been dead for many years.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

in red

You float downstream into the red channels, something sloshes near. You know you're not really there but it is more real than reality. In some sense you really are there, but you need to get out. At some point, along the maze of canals and tunnels criss-crossing in front of you, you saw a point of white light in the distance, surely daylight and the real world -you headed for that point of light but quickly lost your way again in the labyrinth of tunnels, the red pulsating light in them making the views dim and indistinct. There are distant noises, apart from the liquid noises and the pulse that envelopes you; there are whooshing and scraping noises that you can just about make out in the distance. Ah, there's the point of white light. There, it's lost again…

And at some point I'll have to wake up, without having found my way, which means I'll find myself in this maze again, or a similar one, when I next fall asleep and dream. It assumes many forms… there is the maze on Floor 10, where I have to find my uncle's apartment but the lifts and stairs don't take you there, you have to find your way through a series of lifts that take you part of the way, then find the horizontal lift, whatever that means, then the stairs that take you there, to that apartment in shade, full of long-leaved plants in pots, ancient portraits on the wall which I can never quite make out in the semi-darkness, the series of bathrooms, one of which is assigned to me but I can never find so I have to use the other ones but they're almost all of them broken, the radio that will bring me news from outside, an ancient radio from the '30s with names of cities on the dial, 'London', 'Paris', 'Moscow…' but it is mostly static and suddenly a crackled, broken voice in a foreign language I cannot make out…

And then I'm again in the red tunnels, on a craft of some sort, being taken down the canals at speed, trying to steer towards where I think there is that white point of light...

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